Harish-Chandra
Harish - Chandra ( born October 11, 1923 in Kanpur in India, † October 16, 1983 in Princeton, USA) was an Indian mathematician who worked mainly in the field of infinite dimensional representations of Lie groups.
Life and work
Because his father was traveling a lot as a hydraulic engineer, he grew up in Kanpur in the house of his wealthy grandfather. After an education through private tutors, he started school at the age of 9 in the 7th grade and went with 16 at the University of Allahabad. He studied theoretical physics, received his diploma in 1943 and then was assistant to Bhabha, a student of Paul Dirac, in Bangalore. In 1945 he went to Cambridge to do his doctorate under Paul Dirac. At Cambridge he met Wolfgang Pauli, he drew attention to an error. He became increasingly interested in mathematics and listened to John Edensor Littlewood. DC in his doctoral thesis on " Infinite irreducible representations of the Lorentz Group" in 1947, in which he builds on Eugene Wigner, he found the subject for his future research, the theory of high dimensional ( ie those in function spaces ) of non-compact Lie groups (such as of the Lorentz group ), which was much more complex than that of compact Lie groups.
1947/48 he accompanied Dirac as his assistant to Princeton, where the meeting with Hermann Weyl, Emil Artin and Claude Chevalley let him go to the math final. In his opinion, he lacked the necessary for theoretical physics intuition, on the other hand, he was with the lax handling of mathematical theories for physicists dissatisfied (which is also his doctoral thesis concerned ). 1949/1950 he was at Harvard University with Oscar Zariski. 1950 to 1963 he was at Columbia University in New York, but spent considerable time in visiting professorships, so 1952/53, at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay, where he also married. From this marriage two daughters were born. 1955/56, he was in Princeton at the Institute for Advanced Study and in 1957/58 as a Guggenheim Fellow in Paris, where he worked with André Weil. 1961 to 1963 he was again a Sloan Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, and then a permanent member. 1969 and 1970 he had his first two heart attacks in 1970 and went for a sabbatical year to the IHES. In 1982, he had another heart attack, from which he never fully recovered due to more revision.
Harish - Chandra developed the theory of representations of Lie groups (or in algebraic groups of reducible groups) and the corresponding " harmonic analysis " ( the theory defined on the group functions). He defined characters for infinite dimensional representations and proved the analogues of Weyl's character formula. He also determined the " discrete series " representations and determined the Plancherel measure for semisimple Lie groups. He also examined applications in the theory of automorphic forms ( Eisenstein series, etc.) and number theory ( ie as p- adic representations ). His work is of fundamental importance for the Langlands program.
In 1954, he won the Cole prize in algebra. In 1974 he got the Indian Ramanujan Medal. In 1966 he gave a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Moscow (Harmonic analysis on semi -simple Lie groups ), and also in 1954 in Amsterdam ( Representations of semisimple Lie groups). He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, the National Academy of Sciences ( 1981), the Indian National Science Academy and the Indian Academy of Sciences. In 1980 he became a U.S. citizen. In 1981 he became an honorary doctorate from Yale University.
The asteroid ( 24944 ) Harish - Chandra was named after him.
His friend and pupil VS Varadarajan published his collected works.
Harish - Chandra Research Institute
1966 by Harish Chandra named Harish Chandra Research Institute was opened in Allahabad. It is dedicated to research in mathematics and theoretical physics.